The “Aha!” Moment

As regular readers of my posts know, when inspiration flags, I flag one of my colleagues for inspiration. This week, once again, it’s Michael Maslin doing guest-blogger duties. Michael, be my guest:

Often, before a cartoonist gets an idea, there are many rivers to cross. If one is lucky, there are times when a gift from the Cartoon Gods arrives unexpectedly, even unbidden. Either way, it’s up to the cartoonist to grasp the idea, to identify it, and to put it down on paper—or whatever surface is handy, just as long as you put it down. (“The One That Got Away” is a subject for another post.)

If you’ve ever seen the Betty Boop cartoons, you’ll remember the character Grampy, who puts on his thinking cap when there’s a problem to be solved. The cap has a lightbulb that begins to brighten as Gramps thinks, and then goes dark. He thinks some more, and suddenly the lightbulb grows very bright, the light pulsates, and Grampy shouts, “Ahhhh! Aha! I’ve got it!”

Recently, I asked a few of my colleagues if they’d had a specific “Aha!” moment—that precise moment when an idea for a cartoon came to them—when their thinking-cap lightbulb burned very bright.

Charles Barsotti didn’t point to one particular drawing, but he did speak about his method of work, which sometimes includes “the moment.”

Charles Barsotti

I start with a small stack of paper, good paper that can stand a lot of erasing, because I seldom begin with a specific idea for a cartoon. Then I start drawing in pencil—drawing and erasing. Kings come and go:

As do money-hungry businessmen:

and sleazy politicians:

Pups usually stay a little longer. I like pups.

Of course, before all that, I’m choked with rage that the world isn’t perfect and that many people are asses.

After a while, if I’ve plugged away hard enough and tossed out enough ideas, yes, there can be an “Aha!” moment, and it’s great. Sometimes that’s followed by “Where did that come from?” Waste no time with that question.

Ink it in.

Kim Warp

For me, it’s always darkest just before the “Aha!” moment. I am wallowing in crappy ideas, considering all other career possibilities, and procrastinating by any means possible. Sometimes this process itself leads to the “Aha!” moment, producing a cartoon like this one, which came to me suddenly while I was cleaning the vacuum closet. I was supposed to be drawing, of course, which always triggers the urge to do something so virtuous that it excuses the procrastination. Suitable tasks include cleaning, organizing, yard work, grocery shopping, or anything else that I can claim is for the good of the family. But, honestly, it’s anything that doesn’t involve touching that dreaded blank paper. Anyway, there I was, putting anything not nailed down into labelled plastic containers and sorting the shelves to a level perhaps not necessary, when I admitted to myself that it was possible to be over-organized. My cartoonist brain (which is like a shark, constantly prowling my subconscious for ideas) immediately tacked the word “crime” onto organized, and I had my “Aha!” moment. For me, this isn’t always a big relief, because there’s still that pesky blank paper and the realization “Argggh! Perspective! A lot of tiny lettering! Staircase!,” which will be necessary to get the idea to work.

Carolita Johnson

Once, when I was just starting out and having trouble drawing, I tried to draw a cartoon based on a scene I loved from “A Fistful of Dollars”: that scene in which Clint Eastwood drapes his poncho over his shoulder so that the bad guys can see that he’s got a gun on his hip. But his poncho came out looking like some old Upper West Side lady’s shawl. I was so disappointed with the drawing, but then I almost heard Clint saying, “It’s not a shawl, hombre—it’s a hand-woven poncho.” I tried it, and it sold.

Liam Walsh

I get most of my ideas when I’m not in my studio; long walks and bicycle rides are especially fruitful. I live right next to Prospect Park, and I spend time there every day. (I find that I’ve had fewer good ideas this winter, and I place the blame directly on the bitter weather’s curtailing of my usual walking and riding habits.) I also find that a lot of the ideas I get come from external stimuli and, being a creature of regular habit, I struggle to find fresh angles on my most frequent activities: playing with my cat, skirmishing with my wife, reading, wasting time online, riding the train, walking, riding my bike. So when I do manage to squeeze a little more juice out of one of those threadbare subjects, it’s a gift, and that’s what this idea was:

I was riding through Prospect Park one summer day, being passed by lots of would-be professional bicyclists in bright spandex that seemed a bit much (after all, if they’re legitimately training, wouldn’t a bit of wind resistance do them, and us, good?), when I saw a parent riding a bicycle with a child’s “tag-along” bike attached to the back. The thoughts collided like a racing bike with a pedestrian, and I pulled off to the side of the road and jotted a sketch in my omnipresent mini-notebook. A New Yorker cartoon was born.

Joe Dator

If there’s one thing I love, it’s Martin Scorsese films from the seventies in which Robert De Niro talks to a mirror, and probably the best one of those is “Taxi Driver.” In fact, that’s the only one, really. What’s that, you say? Scorsese also directed “Raging Bull,” which also features a scene in which De Niro talks to a mirror? Yeah, well, “Raging Bull” is from 1980. Anyway, I got to thinking that the mirror scene in “Taxi Driver” has become so iconic in pop culture that I might be able to use it as the basis for a cartoon. I thought that I could switch out De Niro for some other character, and then change his line “You talkin’ to me?” to something else, and that would complete the gag.

What to put there in place of De Niro was obvious: a cheap-looking wizard. If there’s one more thing I love, it’s cheap-looking wizards.

So I drew this, and changed the line to something a little more wizardy:

Somehow, it just didn’t work. I thought it was funny, but no one else did, so I tried a few different things. A conductor:

A mime, with the dialogue in parentheses:

None of these worked, either, so I put the cartoon aside for a few weeks. I knew that I wanted to use the mirror and also do something funny with the caption. At some point, I thought, what if the character is texting to himself in the mirror? Then I can use texting abbreviations. That was promising, but who should the character be? Then the “Aha!” moment happened: “Screw it—just use De Niro.”

This one worked. It played off of people’s familiarity with the iconic scene, and it was about something contemporary, something that fit into The New Yorker. Everyone was happy, and the cartoon was well-worth the twenty million dollars that I had to pay Mr. De Niro to appear in it.

Mick Stevens

Once I started looking through my work, I realized I haven’t had many “Aha!” moments. Mostly they’ve just been “Ha!” moments, or, quite often, “Ha?” moments, as in, “Is this actually funny?” I did discover one idea, though, that took me by surprise.

My studio window looks onto the street in front of my house. There’s not much action out there, just the occasional dogwalker or neighbor’s car. I was sitting there one day, as usual, my clipboard waiting in my lap, stocked with paper as blank as my mind at that moment, when I saw a stretch limo drive by. For no particular reason, I began drawing the car. I was about halfway done, with no idea about what I might do with the drawing, when I noticed a pickup truck go by outside with a lawnmower, rakes, and various other tools in the back. Instead of finishing the drawing of the car as I had intended, I drew the tail end of the car as a pickup, stocked with garden tools. The caption popped into my head a little later, an “Aha!” moment that arrived on its own, without any help from the window.

Thanks, Michael, and thanks to all the cartoonists for musing on that quirky cartoon muse we know so well.

P.S. I’m at the SXSW festival from March 7th to the 11th. I’ll be giving a presentation on March 10th on crowdsourcing humor. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by. Ordinarily, you would need an SXSW badge to get in. But just tell whomever is checking, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges; we get Bob Mankoff’s newsletter!” Then wave a printed version of this post in front of the hulking heavies preventing your entrance. Then run like hell.

Speaking of running like hell, I’m really looking forward to the SXSW festival. But I sure hope that it doesn’t turn out like the SXSW festival I was at last year.

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